Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

John Berry

The art of risk-taking

Despite the economic gloom, ENO’s John Berry is optimistic about the future of opera Opera director David Alden said in a recent interview, ‘Opera is alive, popular — and hot.’ I agree. Opera is very much in the public eye and thriving in UK opera houses, cinemas and performing arts centres. However, as we wait to see the outcome of the coalition’s spending review, the arts community has been vocal about its concerns and fears. London is not Munich or Vienna where public subsidy for the arts is a way of life and debated on the same level of necessity as health and education. Yet Britain is revered worldwide for the energy and

Kate Maltby

THEATRE: Review – Deathtrap Noel Coward Theatre

When was the last time you shuddered in the stalls as a deathly thriller played out on stage?  It’s a long time since the heyday of the West End whodunnit, when audiences piled tight into theatres only to better leap from their seats and squeal each time Death struck again. The world expert on modern storytelling structures, Princeton professor Peter Brooks, claims that rise of the thriller was directly related to middle class anxiety about social and familial disorder – perhaps, in Broken Britain, there are few suffocating nuclear families from which to escape, and the chaos of the outside world is less of a shocking intrusion than a constant

Andrew Lambirth

Out of the ordinary | 11 September 2010

Frederick Cayley Robinson: Acts of Mercy National Gallery, until 17 October The free exhibitions in the Sunley Room offer a programme of meditations on the National Gallery’s permanent collection, either through works of art directly inspired by or related to the old masters, or connected in a more oblique way. Frederick Cayley Robinson (1862–1927) is a little-known early-20th-century English painter in oils, tempera and watercolour who deserves wider recognition: this loan exhibition is the first show of his work for more than 30 years.  A traditionalist with a feeling for the more modern statement, Cayley Robinson was using the same methods and materials as the old masters, but wanted to

Lloyd Evans

Vexed issues

Clybourne Park Royal Court, until 2 October Tiny Kushner Tricycle, until 25 September Bash the bourgeoisie is a game the Royal Court likes playing and I’m always keen to join in. Bruce Norris, a brilliant American satirist, delighted us a few years back with The Pain and the Itch, a hilarious exposure of middle-class hypocrisy. Clybourne Park is a pair of plays set in a house in the prosperous Chicago suburbs. We start in the 1950s when black families are just arriving in the neighbourhood. We then fast-forward 60 years and see prosperous whites returning after decades of poverty and neglect. The earlier play feels very wonky. The dice are

Michael Tanner

Without harmful intent

Hänsel und Gretel Royal Albert Hall How frightening an opera is Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, or how frightening should it be? The answer to the first question, if one had only encountered Hänsel at the Prom performance which Glyndebourne brought to London last week, was ‘not at all’. It was given in a semi-staged version, but virtually nothing of Laurent Pelly’s distinctive production survived. At Glyndebourne the family live in a cardboard house; the forest the children wander into looking for berries is denuded, empty plastic shopping baskets hang from branches; and in Act III the Witch’s gingerbread house is a vast construction of gaudily packaged junk foods; while —

Kate Chisholm

Liberation day

‘We’re women, not ladies,’ the Women’s Libber, still in campaigning mode after 40 years, reminded us sharply. ‘We’re women, not ladies,’ the Women’s Libber, still in campaigning mode after 40 years, reminded us sharply. She was for the first time in the same room as Peter Jolley, who had helped to organise the notorious 1970 Miss World contest. He, too, does not seem to have changed much in the intervening decades. ‘So much work went into it, my dear,’ he insisted, riling his fellow conversationalists, perhaps deliberately. Twenty-five billion viewers switched on to watch the event at the Royal Albert Hall as 58 ‘girls’ from around the world were set

Simon Hoggart

Sex lives and videotape

Him and Her (BBC 3) is the BBC’s notion of a really edgy sitcom. Him and Her (BBC 3) is the BBC’s notion of a really edgy sitcom. This is not My Family. The first words uttered are from a bloke who is in bed with his girlfriend. ‘You. Are. Very good at blow jobs.’ ‘Thank you,’ she says demurely. ‘And I am brilliant at receiving them.’ Moments later we see her sitting on the loo, and not just for a pee. Then a neighbour drops round to discuss, inter alia, Kate Winslet’s breasts, and how everyone pauses that bit on the Titanic DVD. I found myself wondering what would

Monday

Kate Maltby

THEATRE: How To Be Another Woman

There’s a moment in the Gate Theatre’s new devised play, How To Be Another Woman, when an actress slowly mimes reaching for a book and ostentatiously flipping it open on a crowded bus. She tells her companion that she’s reading Madame Bovary. There’s a moment in the Gate Theatre’s new devised play, How To Be Another Woman, when an actress slowly mimes reaching for a book and ostentatiously flipping it open on a crowded bus. She tells her companion that she’s reading Madame Bovary. The audience isn’t fooled. We can see that she’s posing with a stiff sequined evening bag, the flap held open like the cover of a book. 

Saturday

Roderick Conway-Morris

Seaside renaissance

Roderick Conway Morris on how Genoa’s glorious Villa del Principe has been brought back to life Palazzo Doria Pamphilj houses the most important private art collection in Rome. But the family possesses another treasure, the Villa del Principe in Genoa. The Doria side of the family moved to Rome in 1760, when they inherited the Pamphilj titles and estates, after which the Villa del Principe suffered a slow decline, punctuated by two major disasters. But after 16 years of work it has now been restored and reopened to the public. Donna Gesine Principessa Doria Pamphilj, who stays there regularly with her husband Massimiliano Floridi and their three children, said when

Andrew Lambirth

Shared affection

The Switch 12A, Nationwide As a rule, Richard Burton acted stupendously well in stupendously bad films. Jennifer Aniston has mastered half that duality. The Switch, her latest film, is comfort-zone Aniston: a charmless rom-com with a crass attempt at eroticism — Toy Story’s more titillating, to be honest. Cliché is The Switch’s currency. A pallid dawn rises over New York’s landmarks and we are taken back seven years. It is breakfast time. An aging girl-next-door (Aniston) tells her lachrymose friend and former lover Wally (Jason Bateman) that she is seeking a sperm donor. ‘The clock has struck,’ she says, to crown the cliché. Cue three minutes of scrotal innuendo, references

David Blackburn

Comfort-zone Aniston

The Switch 12A, Nationwide As a rule, Richard Burton acted stupendously well in stupendously bad films. Jennifer Aniston has mastered half that duality. The Switch, her latest film, is comfort-zone Aniston: a charmless rom-com with a crass attempt at eroticism — Toy Story’s more titillating, to be honest. Cliché is The Switch’s currency. A pallid dawn rises over New York’s landmarks and we are taken back seven years. It is breakfast time. An aging girl-next-door (Aniston) tells her lachrymose friend and former lover Wally (Jason Bateman) that she is seeking a sperm donor. ‘The clock has struck,’ she says, to crown the cliché. Cue three minutes of scrotal innuendo, references

Michael Tanner

Bliss with Stravinsky

Renard; Mavra; The Rake’s Progress Glyndebourne Anyone who was lucky enough to go to Glyndebourne on one of three days last week had the option of seeing not only the opera they had booked for, but also, before it, a couple of brief works by Stravinsky that were put on by the Jerwood Chorus Development Scheme, with the Britten Sinfonia and young singers, in the Jerwood Studio. It was rigged up as a circus tent, the action of the pieces taking place in the arena, while the small orchestra — a little too backward — played behind that. The two together made 45 minutes of bliss, Stravinsky at his insouciant

Charles Spencer

In the steps of Larkin

Last month, when unveiling my all-time top ten favourite albums, I predicted that the list would probably have changed by the autumn. In fact, it changed within days of filing my copy. For along came Larkin’s Jazz, which I think is the finest, most scholarly and above all wonderfully entertaining and affecting CD collection that has come my way since starting this column nine years ago. I have already written about it briefly in the Telegraph, after it first landed on my doormat almost a month ago, but further listening, and reading the superbly annotated 56-page booklet that accompanies it, has deepened my admiration for this four-CD set, compiled with

Lloyd Evans

Let Hester fester

In the Blood Finborough, until 4 September Zelda Leicester Square Those who oppose state-funded theatre in Britain sometimes imagine that America, with its far smaller subsidised sector, is spared the sort of pious, jokeless, grind-yer-nose-in-it plays which our handout theatres use to punish audiences for the sin of being affluent. But American theatre turns out to be richly contaminated with underclass miserablism too. Suzan-Lori Parks is a supreme purveyor of the goods and, like many second-rate talents from minority backgrounds, she’s been given more prizes than Chekhov. She’s won the Pulitzer. She’s been nominated for a Tony. She occupies the Master Writer Chair at a New York theatre and she’s

James Delingpole

Opiate for the masses

One of the few things I respect about mainstream TV is how utterly shallow and addictive it is. In many ways it’s like crack: it doesn’t pretend that it’s good for you but it gets you to where you want to go way more effectively than tofu or wheatgrass juice or organic dolphin-friendly tuna caught with rod and line. Sometimes it achieves high artistic standards too, but this is usually a fluke, which happens despite the medium rather than because of it. TV isn’t like film or opera or theatre or sculpture or any of that poncy stuff. Its main job is to get you out of it as quickly

Kate Chisholm

Pick up a Penguin

What must it have been like for Allen Lane to wander into a bookshop in the 1940s and see the serried ranks of pale-blue, cerise, green, yellow, dark-blue and grey Penguins on display, knowing that he was responsible for all of them? His genius idea had in less than a decade transformed not just bookselling but also what everyone in Britain (and soon the English-speaking world) was reading. Penguins were cheap to buy, just 6d a throw, or the price of a packet of cigarettes, yet were literature of the highest quality and broadest range — from Maurois, Hemingway, Marx and Homer to Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Compton

Saturday

Tiffany Jenkins

Mourning in America

New York is in the grip of memorial mania, writes Tiffany Jenkins In early 1991, the construction of a federal office building in lower Manhattan was halted after an unexpected discovery. Underneath the ground, covered by a patina of concrete and steel, was the coffin of a colonial-era African. It was not alone. Construction work was halted, archaeologists called in, and it was soon established that the site was a major burial ground from the 17th and 18th centuries. As many as 15,000 to 20,000 black men, women and children were buried there, by the historians’ count, making this one of the most important archaeological finds in all America. The

Andrew Lambirth

Well met in Mexico

The Surreal House Barbican Art Gallery, until 12 September Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 12 September It may not come as a surprise to readers to learn that ‘the individual dwelling [is] a place of mystery and wonder’, yet this is the premise of the Barbican’s latest attempt to pull in the punters. A portmanteau surrealism show that tries to blend art, film and architecture, its reach exceeds its grasp, though the designers must have had great fun carving up the space into dark cabins and voids. Some of the best exhibits — apart from fine things by de Chirico, Magritte

Lloyd Evans

Bad, good and ugly

Uber Hate Gang Underbelly Little Black Bastard; Stripped Gilded Balloon The Tailor of Inverness Udderbelly Pasture Ginger and Black Pleasance And it’s getting bigger. Amazing as it sounds, the Edinburgh Festival keeps expanding like a slum landlord. Every year half a dozen cobwebbed halls and disused assembly rooms are forced open, spruced up and pressed into service for the ragamuffin hordes of wannabe superstars. It’s getting harder to find your way round, too. Luck was against me when I set off for Uber Hate Gang, an acclaimed masterwork from ‘Britain’s hottest young theatre company’ at the Underbelly. I found it all too easily. The dank, cold, unlit venue smelled of

Michael Tanner

Sound bites

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival Hammersmith Studios It’s 11 years since I first went to a Tête à Tête evening, then at the Battersea Arts Centre, a most agreeable location, but not used by Tête à Tête since 2004, I think. Nowadays there is a whole festival each year in August, the operatic low season, planned by the founder and artistic director, Bill Bankes-Jones, whose enthusiasm knows no bounds. Sometimes I wonder if it might not be a good thing if it knew at least one or two. The first, and excellent idea he had was to encourage young composers with an interest in writing opera to write a